
Now an elaborate estate, Derwent was once a simple house. It was here that General Robert E. Lee and his family found shelter during the summer of 1865, after the close of the Civil War and before he assumed the presidency of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University; RB16). The original two-story, frame, single-pile central-hall house is typical of many houses that dot the Virginia countryside. It varies only in the shortness of the upper windows of the compressed second story.